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#70 Bacchus Brewing Yummy Mummy Rocky Road

Bacchus Brewing was all over Brewsvegas with fifty beers – twenty-five of them new – around the town. Ross Kenrick and his motley team have five 50L and one 100L kettles at their disposal and can push through twelve completely different beers in a day. The results are some of Brisbane’s best and weirdest beers. Craison, the crayfish infused saison, anyone? Or a hibiscus and rosella sour ale?

So to today’s beer. It’s rather unassuming looking which I tried for the first time at Kerbside’s Craft Beer Alley but I was sold on the idea that it tastes like rocky road.

I’m not sure how well known rocky road, as a concept, is. It’s a conglomerated confectionery, consisting of chocolate, marshmallows, nuts, Turkish delight and sometimes candied fruit. This is the most appealing photo I could find:

Nicked from eatwithnat.com

While it’s not particularly pretty to look at, I have a sweet tooth, so obviously I’m a fan. For a rocky road beer, the bar is set high.

On the pour, there’s not a lot of head, although it is a festival sampler, with a white ring of small bubbles forming quickly. The colour is a bit like chocolate milk but carbonated. The nose is promising though. I would have more notes but I wasn’t really planning on reviewing this at the time.

More importantly, and really vividly from my memory, the taste is bang on the money. Even in my 200mL plastic cup – and I wish I had snuck in my Spiegelau – my first four thoughts were “chocolate”, “peanut”, “marshmallow” and “maybe a bit of berry jam”. Turns out the latter was sweet cherries, although the previous version had sour cherries. In essence, liquid rocky road. A glance at the most recent Untappd checkins makes it pretty clear I’m not the only one who got that. I don’t know how they did it but I suspect it involved adding chocolate grain, marshmallows, peanut essence and cherries to the mix. Of course!

It wouldn’t be Drunken Speculation if I didn’t have a problem though. First is the name. I get it (Brisbane beer scene inside joke) but I’m reluctant to order a “Yummy Mummy’. It sounds creepy coming from me. Secondly, the peanuts in the beer destroy the foam. It looks and tastes less a beer and more a chocolate soft drink with extremely well hidden booze content.

Nonetheless, this is super tasty so it probably seems like a massive tease to talk about a beer that, at best, maybe has a few litres left at Kerbside. Except that an imperialised version is going to be very much available at this year’s GABS and, if you’re lucky enough to be a judge, entered into the AIBA Awards. It’ll be ramped up to around 8% and use the previous version of the recipe, featuring sour cherries. Ross is going with the intention of defending his people’s choice title, so keep an eye out.

Disclosure: Rosco and this blog go a long way back. All the way back to the Bacchus Brew Day. I’m not sure if that’s a conflict of interest, so I’ll leave that for you to decide.